Steering by Starlight by Martha Beck

[Guest guest]

The FDA raiding all the small

farms all over the USA really disturbs me, and for what raw milk?

While I do understand how this

is disturbing just want to offer another viewpoint. I do this not to

provoke a debate or argument. The information offered is simply ‘as

is’ with the intention that eventually our remembrance will be triggered

that we do have the power, always have.

A new type of

thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.

Einstein 1946

" The first guy to go in

always carries a shotgun, " says Kirk Fowler. He's not a big man, for a law

enforcer; in fact, he's not much taller than I am. This is a quality I appreciate

in a martial arts instructor. Kirk is my sensei, and in the middle of a

lesson, he's telling me how he used to serve warrants on suspected drug runners

and coyotes, con artists who take would-be immigrants' money, then load them

into trucks and abandon them in the desert to die. "

" These are really

violent people, " Kirk says, " and they have an intense fight-or-flight

reaction at that first sight of officers. They're usually doing drugs as well

selling them, and that makes them about as violent and unpredictable as humans

get. You're never in more danger than when you're walking into a room to serve

a warrant. It's scary as hell. "

It's hard to imagine Kirk

terrified. He's a master of aikido, a martial art that focuses more on inner

peace than on physical power. I'm learning aikido because it works like magic.

Literally. An aikido master gently touches your head, and suddenly you're on

the floor. You try to slug him, and you can barely lift your arm. These effects

feel almost supernatural, but given a few minutes, anyone can use them well

enough to see that they're real. So it isn't surprising that Kirk's aikido

training was very helpful when he worked for the Border Patrol. What is

surprising is the way it helped.

" One day when I was

serving a warrant, I decided to try going in with my energy totally calm and

relaxed, instead of high adrenaline. The suspects were in a motel room, wired,

scared, and well armed. To reach a place where my energy was calm, I had to

imagine that all of them were already dead. "

" So I went into that

room feeling really quiet and respectful, the way you'd feel going to a

funeral. And when I opened the door, no one did anything. The suspects just

looked at me as though they'd invited me to a summer picnic. They cooperated

with the officers through the while arrest. Even to me that was weird. "

" From then on, " Kirk concludes, " I kept my energy tuned that way

whenever we served a warrant. I still had the shotgun. But I never needed it.

Over and over, people who should have fought or run simply started

cooperating. "

Excerpt from the book " Steering by Starlight " by Martha Beck